Teaching

I am an Honorary Professor in Sport (Sports Rehabilitation & Applied Sports Science) at the University of Salford.

I have been appointed as the Soft Tissue Knee Surgery Module Lead of the Mersey Deanery Postgraduate Specialist Registrar Teaching Programme.

I organized and hosted a series of sports medicine education lectures for swimmers and their parents in December 2006 on common swimming injuries and their prevention, sports psychology and drugs in sport.

I enjoy teaching and have taught students in Liverpool, Salford, Manchester, Sheffield, St Andrews, Dundee, Inverness, Cambridge, Glasgow and Edinburgh, from undergraduate medical and sports rehabilitation students to Masters Students in Orthopaedics and Biomechanics. My undergraduate responsibilities, as the Lecturer in Dundee, ranged from class lectures to small group clinical sessions. During my Lectureship, I was a Student Support Scheme Tutor and I had responsibility for the SHO trainees in our unit from 2001 to 2008. I am experienced in formative and summative student assessments.

I have lectured on the Liverpool and Dundee MCh (Orthopaedics) courses, and have helped organise and examine in the Dundee finals. I taught applied anatomy to Bioengineering MSc students, set and marked their final examination. I have supervised Honours and Masters Students’ theses in the Universities of Salford, Bath, Cardiff, Dundee and St Andrews.

A number of Liverpool undergraduate students have approached me to set up a Special Study Module in Sports Knee Surgery, the first two joined the unit in January 2010 studying aspects of soft tissue and arthroplasty surgery.

I regularly teach undergraduate sports rehabilitation students from the University of Salford and teach UK special forces paramedics during placements to my unit. I have been an Honorary Professor in Sport (Sports Rehabilitation & Applied Sports Science) at the University of Salford since 2006 and was proud to be reappointed for a further three years earlier last year.

I was involved the assessment of students participating in the distance learning courses run by the University of Dundee Department of Orthopaedic and Trauma Surgery.

At Raigmore I designed the applied surgical anatomy and trauma module of the postgraduate program. In Dundee I have helped design and have responsibility for the co-ordination of their new postgraduate programme.

I taught on the Orthofix Intermediate and Introductory and AO Basic Courses in Dundee and Manchester and on the national faculty of the Essential Fracture Management Course. I have been on the national faculty of the Introductory hip and knee arthroplasty “road show” courses, which have so far visited Cardiff, Bristol, Manchester, Wrightington and the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh and London and have organised this course to be held in Warrington on a bi-annual basis.  I am a member of the faculty of the Essentials of hip arthroplasty course, sponsored by DePuy, held in Manchester, each year.

I have designed and organised a course to teach basic knee arthroscopy to orthopaedic trainees in a collaboration between the Universities of St Andrews and Dundee, and Smith and Nephew Limited, latterly Storz. Video teaching material for the course has been supplied by the BBC, from the Scottish Premier League and Football Association. The course has run successfully for eight years. I have recently secured the inclusion of the SKATS computerised simulator to objectively measure improvements in arthroscopic skills as a result of the course. I have been invited to prepare intermediate and advanced knee soft tissue surgery courses by the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh, who kindly secured a digital image capture system to collect images of relevant cases. Video footage material from arthroscopic procedures has been collected and edited to be in these courses. I have been invited to faculties on a number of basic, intermediate and advanced soft tissue knee surgery courses sponsored by a number of different companies. One exiting development is that Smith & Nephew are opening a Learning Centre in York in which we will deliver the first arthroscopic course in early 2010. I carried out live videoed surgical demonstration of the implantation of a MACI graft via mini-arthrotomy in Las Vegas at the AAOS presenting to an international audience the development of the technique there. I presented the technique in Osaka, Japan at the ISAKOS meeting in May 2010. I have also been invited into an international faculty to train experienced surgeons in advanced articular cartilage resurfacing techniques. I have sat on a world medical advisory group defining the operative technique for arthroscopic implantation of the MACI graft for the treatment of symptomatic articular cartilage defect in the knee. I have been invited to carry out a live surgical demonstration of the technique in Rio De Janero, Brazil next spring at the ISAKOS meeting.

I have had two Orthopaedic Physiotherapy specialists working with me to improve the quality of care for patients with knee problems, particularly those undergoing ligament reconstruction and anterior knee pain, Mrs Alison Hatcher has worked with me since 2002 she has developed evidence-based rehabilitation protocols and patient information for all major knee and hip arthroplasty surgery undertaken in the unit and  evidence-based rehabilitation classes for lower limb in particular Anterior Cruciate and multiple Ligament reconstructions. She has presented the preliminary results of this at a national physiotherapy meeting and a paper is in preparation for publication. From 2003-4 Miss Alison Eliott worked in a joint post as Orthopaedic Physiotherapy specialist in the unit here in Warrington and as a Lecturer in the Sports Rehabilitation Dept of the University of Salford, concentrating mainly on the management of anterior knee pain.

We have a number of collaborative studies ongoing with Julian Hatcher and Lee Herrington, Senior Lecturers in Sport (Sports Rehabilitation & Applied Sports Science) University of Salford: A controlled clinical trial to examine the effects of chronic anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) deficiency on proprioception using the Star Excursion Balance Test was presented at the 13th Commonwealth International Sports Conference, Melbourne, March, 2006.

I have secured £500,000 funding from Zimmer for an Audit Nurse and Fellow to prospectively audit all knee and selected hip arthroplasties carried out in the our Unit, to improve quality assurance by objective independent patient review.

I have been running the Warrington Knee Fellowship for just over five years now and have supervised the Fellows to produce many presentations and a number of peer reviewed publications are in press or published. The first Fellow, James Arbuthnot has been appointed to the Birmingham SpR Rotation. Gareth Stables has been appointed to the Merseyside SpR Rotation, Yioannis Pengas is working as an LAT in Tayside, Manickam Rathinam is working as a Knee Fellow in Warwick and Paul Meyers has been appointed as my current Knee Fellow.

I have carried out admission interviews for prospective medical students in Dundee, and interview prospective members of staff in Warrington. I was a member of the Medical Advisory Committee, at the BUPA North Cheshire Hospital in 2003-4.

I was on the Steering Committee for the First International Trauma Conference: Trauma 2004 “Roadside to Critical Care”   held in the Crowne Plaza Hotel, Liverpool 22nd-24th November 2004. I chaired the Trauma surgery session with presentations on amputation for trauma, limb reconstruction and controlling haemorrhage in pelvic injuries. I was on the Steering Committee for the Second International Trauma Conference: Trauma 2006 “What’s New?”  held in Liverpool Town Hall 22nd-24th November 2006. I arranged funding for and presented the Best Poster Prize, generously supported by Orthofix, for the best presentation of a trauma topic by a trainee at the conference.

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